South Holland

The province's two big cities are the country's most instructive contrast, twenty-five minutes apart by intercity train. The Hague is the stately one: parliament on the Hofvijver, the royal working palace, the Mauritshuis with Girl with a Pearl Earring, the Peace Palace's international courts, and eleven kilometres of beach at Scheveningen and Kijkduin. Rotterdam is the audacious one: rebuilt after 1940 into the Netherlands' showcase of modern architecture — Cube Houses, Markthal, the Depot's mirror bowl, the Erasmus Bridge — with Europe's largest port as its working backdrop. Doing both from one base is effortless; doing them justice takes two days each.

Delft is the province's most concentrated dose of old Holland: a compact canal grid between two monumental churches, barely changed since Vermeer painted his View of Delft from across the harbour. The Nieuwe Kerk on the Markt holds the burial vault of the royal House of Orange-Nassau and a tower with the best view in the province; the Oude Kerk, with its visibly leaning tower, holds Vermeer's grave. Royal Delft — the last of the 17th-century potteries still operating — shows the hand-painting of Delft Blue in its original works, and the Vermeer Centrum walks through the painter's complete oeuvre in reproduction where it can be studied at leisure. Delft is fifteen minutes by tram or train from The Hague and twelve from Rotterdam — but it deserves an overnight, when the day-trippers leave the canals to the locals.

Leiden combines the country's oldest university (1575), Rembrandt's birthplace, and the densest museum cluster outside the big three cities: the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden (the national antiquities collection, with a real Egyptian temple in the entrance hall), the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave for the history of science, Naturalis for natural history, and the Museum Volkenkunde's world cultures. The town itself is the attraction, though — a double ring of moats and canals, three dozen hofjes courtyards behind unassuming doors, the Burcht's circular castle mound, and a Saturday market along the water that has been running for centuries. The Pieterskerk quarter remembers the Pilgrims, who lived in Leiden for a decade before sailing for America. From Leiden Centraal, the bulb fields and Keukenhof are a short bus ride in season.

The nineteen windmills of Kinderdijk, built around 1740 to drain the Alblasserwaard polder, stand in two facing rows along their drainage canals south-east of Rotterdam — the most powerful image of the Dutch relationship with water, and a UNESCO World Heritage site. Two mills are open as museums, showing how the miller families lived inside the working machines; the visitor route can be walked, cycled or done by hop-on boat along the canals. The classic approach is the waterbus from Rotterdam's Erasmus Bridge — a fast-ferry ride through the working river landscape. Go early or late if you can: midday coach crowds in summer are real, but the mills at golden hour, sails turning against the polder sky, justify every photograph ever taken of them.

The Duin- en Bollenstreek — the sandy strip between the dunes and the lakes around Lisse, in the province's north-west corner — is the heart of the Dutch flower industry, and from late March to mid-May it performs Europe's most photographed agricultural spectacle. Keukenhof, the showcase garden, plants some seven million bulbs each autumn for an eight-week spring opening: tulips, daffodils and hyacinths in designed woodland beds, with pavilions for the growers' showpiece varieties. Book timed tickets online and come before ten or after three; combine the garden with a bike ride through the surrounding working fields, whose striped colour blocks are free, fragrant and at their peak in mid-April. Outside the season, the strip reverts to quiet dune-edge villages — and the beach at Noordwijk holds the area's resort tradition year round.

Gouda — yes, the cheese — stages its traditional cheese market on Thursday mornings from spring to late summer, wheels changing hands by handclap in front of the 15th-century town hall; the Sint-Janskerk around the corner holds the longest church in the Netherlands and its most celebrated stained-glass windows. The town also claims the stroopwafel, best eaten warm from the market. Dordrecht, where three rivers meet, is the oldest city of Holland, its intact harbour quarter full of leaning merchant houses; from its quays the Biesbosch national park — one of Europe's last freshwater tidal wildernesses, a maze of creeks best explored by canoe or whisper-boat — is minutes away. Between the cities stretches the Groene Hart (Green Heart), the protected agrarian middle of the Randstad: cheese farms, lakes and meadow polders criss-crossed by some of the country's most pleasant cycling routes.

South Holland's North Sea coast runs in an almost unbroken line of beach and dune from Hoek van Holland to the province's northern edge at Noordwijk. Scheveningen is the flagship resort — pier, Kurhaus, surf schools and beach pavilions; Kijkduin next door is its quieter family sibling. Hoek van Holland, at the mouth of the Nieuwe Waterweg and reachable on the Rotterdam metro, adds the spectacle of deep-sea ships passing within metres of the beach on their way into Europe's busiest port. Behind the beaches, the dune reserves — Meijendel between The Hague and Wassenaar, Hollands Duin north of Katwijk — protect a surprisingly wild landscape of sand ridges, woods and wandering Highland cattle, laced with cycling and walking paths. Noordwijk, with its wide beach and the European Space Agency's visitor centre Space Expo, closes the line in style.